On March 2, the faculty of Rhode Island School of Design overwhelmingly voted no confidence in Maeda’s ability to lead the school as president…. [T]he faculty is not “uncomfortable,” “disappointed” and “generally unsatisfied” with John Maeda. They hate him. They have lost all respect for him as a leader and as a person. And they want him out….
John Maeda may think that because he has a smartphone and can process the video he is taking of you (while you are trying to converse with him) through HTML5 and make it interact with objects in a cornfield in real time or some such thing, that somehow his vision of what art education is and should be is “more advanced” than that of the rest of the faculty at RISD, but in this thinking he is also mistaken….
[W]e did not understand that his great talent seems to be that of the person who first sees a shiny object in the marketplace and runs to get it…. We wanted bright, shiny things to be part of what people saw at RISD.
What John Maeda did wrong at RISD
The foregoing posting appeared on Joe Clark’s personal Weblog on 2011.03.14 09:00. This presentation was designed for printing and omits components that make sense only onscreen. The permanent link is: https://blog.fawny.org/2011/03/14/maeda-ilyin/